Be still my beating heart

“Bye mom,” he said as he picked up his lunch kit and headed out into the frigid early morning darkness for another day at the sawmill, “I won’t be home for dinner tonight because I am going to the archery tournament with Sam.”

Words to warm the cockles of this mother’s heart. Our Boy has such a hard row to hoe when it comes to relationships with people because of whatever it is that is wrong with him.* Animals seem to love him, but not people. The very few people who have tended to be involved in his life on an on-going basis in the few years since he moved back to town have are themselves defective in some way. I have never met Sam, a colleague of his at work, but what our son says about him, and how he treats our son, leads me to believe he is a decent sort of man who genuinely seems to like our Boy. Sam is involved in archery, and our son became interested in archery well. Sam sold him a used compound bow at a reasonable price, and he has been practicing. They entered a tournament, with 2 sessions held over a 2-week period, with a final session coming up.

I settled into my chair in front of the computer with a cuppa coffee and started working and eventually came to a manuscript that set my heart to beating just a tad faster when I saw the topic. This was a case report by a team of American surgeons who just happened to be at a regional hospital in Africa when a young teenager came in from the countryside after having been shot in the heart with an barbed arrow while hunting. The arrow was still sticking out of his chest, and it pulsed with each beat of the boy’s heart. I guess it was a shocking site. He was not in very good shape, mainly because it took him 3 days to get there once the doctors at the bush hospital realized they could not get the arrow out, but he was still alive. Had the doctors at the bush hospital removed the arrow, the boy would have immediately bled to death. The surgeons saved the day and the boy lived to hunt again.

So I thought about this some. When the Boy came back later in the evening, he was very excited at having had a good time at the tournament, and I was very excited to see that he had not, in fact, been shot in the heart and there did not appear to be any extra holes anywhere else either. One can always be thankful for the small mercies in life.

*For new readers of this blog, who don’t feel like slogging back through 5 years of posts to dredge out all of this (and I don't feel like slogging back through them either!), our son has behaves in ways that are often associated with people who have Asperger syndrome, the main problem being extreme difficulty with social relationships.